The Old Blue Spruce

    There it stood, sheltering the northwest corner of the house, separating the garage from the house, showering the lawn with fire-starting pine cones, shading the west window from hot afternoon suns. 

      For a while it even provided Christmas trees for the farm on the occasions when one was needed.  I would cut off a branch that was rubbing the house wall or roof, make a stand for it, and wrap it with lights.  It was satisfactory for three of us, providing the symbol, color and especially the smell of Christmas.  One of us found such “trees” tawdry, even referring to one as a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.  Oh well.

    But those days are gone.  It has all come down to this:

Top and bottom.

    The transition didn’t happen overnight.  It went like this.

     One March day in 2014, I trimmed branches and fastened a chain around the trunk over half way up. 

     Other priorities emerged.  Finally, January of 2015, the day came. 

     The tree trunk, like most trees on the exposed plane, leaned to the east trained up by the prevailing west winds. 

      I didn’t trust my lumberjack skills to keep the tree from falling either to the garage or the house.  Thus the chain, and the “well” rope.

  

   I enlisted Neighborly to help.  His enthusiasm for something to do in January was tempered somewhat by upcoming surgery on his right knee.  His mobility was restricted, but he grabbed the chainsaw and whacked the top half of the initial wedge out.  Then he manned the Dakota while I finished the cut.

     The sadness of the day was overshadowed by the excitement of the potential danger.  The tree safely down (safely unless you were the unfortunate cedar bush under the spruce trunk), reflection replaced adrenalin.  While the tree will be sorely missed, it was a problem. 

     The spruce had an older sibling on the southwest corner of the house.  One calm summer Sunday afternoon in 1983, a gusting wind blew up suddenly out of the west and snapped the trunk of the southwest spruce.  Fortunately, it fell between the house and the juniper hedge and did little damage.

 1983 Photograph 

    After that event, always in the back of the mind, would another wind blow (is the Pope Catholic?—this is Eastern Colorado)?  Would the northwest tree go gently into that narrow gulch between garage and house?  The question is now moot.

      What once kept the house cool in the summer now heats it this winter.

    Neighborly counted 60 rings on the stump.  That would be about right.   I would have been about ten when we successfully planted it.

    The tree will be sorely missed.  Rest in peace old spruce.

Splitting Wood (Not Hairs)

     Oh, what to do during Covid-19 isolation?

     Keep warm, for one thing.  Mother Nature decided to treat us to a little February in mid-April.  Here at the farm, we received less than a tenth of inch of moisture from the day-long squall.  We received the full blast of cold air, fog, and ice.

     I kept two fires going, one in the shop, where I was working on the old Briggs & Stratton auger engine’s fuel tank and strainer, and one in the farm kitchen.  First, Briggs and Stratton:  over the years, the gas cap deteriorated, first by losing the gasket that helped keep the cap tight on the gas tank, then losing the chain that kept it attached to the tank even when it was not in place. 

     A severe blast from the north somehow blew the cap off and it has been MIA since. I had to clean the tank and the fuel bowl before using.  A heavy piece of plastic held in place by a bearing race worked for a year or two to cover the tank opening.  Somehow, that jerry-rig disappeared this winter, and the tank took on some dirt and rust.

     With spare time spent in the shop, I came up with another jerry-rig.  (I would gladly buy a new cap if I could find one to buy.) 

      Maybe the hose clamps will defy the wind. 

        Two pistons from the old John Deere R occupied the rest of my time between stove-tendings.  More on that someday.  Promptly at 5 p.m. I checked to see the fire in the shop could die safely without spreading like Covid-19, and I returned to tending the kitchen fire and watching television.

     The morrow brought clear skies and brilliant sunshine.  The skiff of snow dressed terra firma in virgin white.  The old elm branches glistened with their glaze of ice.  No day to stay indoors, even though the temperature wouldn’t get much above 50.

     Four or five years ago, I began watching the price of wood splitters at Lowes and Bomgaars.  My interest stemmed from the felling of the poor old spruce tree in the front corner of the yard.  https://50farm.blogspot.com/search?q=spruce  That left me with some huge logs, logs cut to correct lengths, but much too big to lift, let alone get into a stove.

     The thought of attacking those logs with maul and wedge didn’t appeal to me.  Nor did moving them to mow where they protected rabid weed and grass growth.  Thus, the observation of wood splitters at the box stores. 

      The price of the splitters rose in the fall at the beginning of wood-burning season.  It was spring of 2017, I think, the price went down by a hundred dollars.  Many of the same splitters were sitting there from the previous Fall..  Time to get rid of them, I guess.

 The splitter has its own wheels, but I didn’t think those small wheels and bearings were up to a 150-mile trip at any kind of speed.  I told the salesman that I would take one of the splitters only if it would go into the back of my little pickup.  Out came his tape measure.  It would go into the back of the pickup.  With the help of his forklift, it did go into the back of my pickup.

       The pickup was heavier by 3 or 400 pounds.  My wallet was lighter by $900 + tax.  The huge logs at the farm got lighter.

     “Making firewood warms you twice,” goes the old saying.  The recent felling of a fifty-year-old elm left me with several huge logs.  On the icy sunny morning, I drug out the splitter and went to work.  The rare windless day made for a very pleasant day, Mother Nature’s gift for inflicting the previous day on us.  Between sun and labor, I stayed pleasantly warm.

     

      What would I be doing if we weren't restricted by Covid-19?

     

Fencing

     “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”, er, make that a fence.  I have a hard time thinking of anything that does love a fence.  Tumbleweeds?

    Anyway, harvest is over and it hasn’t rained, so time to catch up on some odd jobs.  Like fixing the mailbox after the combines knocked it over yet again.

         The sign had to be rewelded.

         Back to normal. 

      Note where some mental giant demonstrated his prowess with an automatic weapon, probably done from a vehicle in motion.  (Entry point just above the flag arm, exit just below the last "94".)  That knocked it over, too.  But the sign is back in good order.

      The farm yard has been "hayed", mowed and raked.  The hay is pretty dry.

     New garage doors are on order.  Which leaves the fence.  There isn’t much romantic about fencing.  Right now, I’m pulling 60 or 70 year old neglected fence, much of which has gone underground.

     See the fence?  No?  It’s there, underground.  Ford tractor to the rescue. 

    This device was invented to sever tree roots from big trees that hog the moisture and nutrients from little trees.

    

      Elms from the left send their roots over into the spruce at right.  When that happens, the spruce don't do very well.

    The machine didn’t work too well for severing roots because it doesn’t go deep enough.  But it works pretty well for disinterring ancient barb wire.

     Then the wire hs to be rolled up and hauled off.

    And then there is still some fence to be built for cattle who will be hungry later this summer.  Post driving is a lot of work for one person.  Here is the weaponry and what’s been done.

      And here is what is left to do.

      The new wire is there, used as a guideline to keep the posts in somewhat of a straight line. 

    And then there is still this half mile to remove wire, some of which is actually above ground.  The new wire is there, too.  I plan to fasten it to the old posts temporarily.

      I have some shop work to do too, if it ever rains enough to drive me indoors.

   

Trees—Wait, Make That Elms

 

     It must have been back in the school year ’61-’62, I believe it was.  We were talking about our trees in the classroom.  Mr. Ekgren, our English and wood shop teacher, looked up and said, “What trees?”

    “Why Mr. Ekgren,” someone said, “all those trees,” and pointed out the west window.

    “Those are Chinese elms,” he said.  And so they were, all but a few locusts lining the east end of the Self lot across the street.

      Mr. Ekgren seemed to sense our ignorance. (We were too polite and restrained to ask him if he couldn’t see the trees for the forest, not to mention that we knew from experience that he had a fierce temper and could resort to violence in the right circumstances.)

     “Back in Minnesota, elms are weeds.  Every spring you must go along the fence rows and kill the elms or they will take over everything.  They will grow everywhere, in the rain gutters, in the flower beds.  They are nothing but weeds.”

     That gave us all pause to think, for we all knew something of the struggle to grow a tree on the high plains. 

     It must have been in the early 50’s, an early spring day when Dad and Mom went to the lot north of the house, Dad in his old distillate-stained overcoat, Mom in  her old red cloth coat and floppy bonnet, dressed against the bitter south east wind.  I don’t recall the conversation, but I think Mom wanted Dad to measure so that the trees were evenly spaced.  I’m pretty sure Dad didn’t see the sense in that.  He could step it off evenly.  He did that all the time with fence posts.  Besides, they were just going to put these sticks in the ground.  They wouldn’t grow.

    So off Dad stepped.  I wasn’t involved, too cold and nasty out there.  He went west pretty-well parallel to the house, stepping off  5 or 6 steps, stop, dig a hole, stick a stick in the hole, cover it up with dirt, step off again.

     That went pretty well.  But then he went back to the southeast corner and went north.  That east line wasn’t quite square with the south line, resulting in the “trees” in the northwest corner having quite a lot of space between them, while those in the southwest corner are crowded closer together. 

     Well, those “sticks” took off and grew, nearly all 100 of them, 10 rows of 10, all except those in the northwest corner (too far apart?).  Collectively, they became known as “the trees”.

     At first, there were problems cultivating.  Hoeing was too slow and depressing.  You never got done.  Uncle Ricky tried a sweep fixed to an old two-wheel cart.  Too slow.  Dad ran the oneway through them.  That left dirt piled up around the trunks and a hollow in the rows between the trees.  So Uncle Ricky took an old horse drawn tandem disk apart and tried pulling the back half, the half that pulls the dirt from the outer ends toward the center, through the rows.  That worked fairly well, but it was impossible to get very close to the tree trunk because the disk wasn’t as wide as the tractor wheels.  So the elms grew out of little hills.  Heavy rains left puddles in the center of the squares formed by four trees.  It is that way to this date. 

     After the ground had been cultivated, it was a great place for us to farm and build roads with our toy trucks and tractors.  The sapling trees provided a little shade with a breeze on hot summer days.  The damp soil we dug up contrasted nicely with the dry dirt on the surface as we paved our miniature roads.  It was a welcome change from farming the linoleum with our Tinkertoy equipment in the upstairs playroom.  We actually got to move some real dirt with our dump trucks.

      In a few years, cultivating was a moot point because branches shut down traffic through the rows.  Watering was another problem.  The squeamish had best skip this part.

    We had an old well converted to a cesspool.  It wasn’t terribly deep, and whenever we had sewer troubles, we had an old bucket on the end of a chain.  Down went the bucket.  Up came a bucketful of waste water, odiferous waste water.

     Sometimes, we dumped the water out and let it run away.  But why waste water?  A fifty- gallon drum in the back of the old Ford pickup sometimes, other times on the Farmhand fork (much nicer—you could set the fork on the ground not have to lift the chain and bucket so high) served as the water carrier.  Fill the drum by using the chain and bucket.  Drive out among the trees.  There were various stratagems to get the water out of the drum and onto the trees.  The one I remember was me up in the pickup, using a fruit juice can to dip the effluent out of the drum and pour it into buckets.  Uncle Ricky would take the buckets and give the trees a “good sewer-juicing.”

     Associated in my mind with “tree-watering” is a small pox vaccination.  In those days, the doctor scratched the skin on your arm up near the shoulder.  He then spread the serum on the scratched patch.  We kept it covered with gauze and tape.  A cheerio-looking purplish puss pocket would grow out and shrink back and eventually disappear over a period of weeks.  Many of us old folks still have that scar from that cheerio on our upper arms, indicating we are immune to small pox.  I’m not sure how they do it nowadays.  Maybe they don’t.

    Well sir, I had two of those cheerios.  All of us boys were inoculated at the same time.  We all had the shoulder cheerio simultaneously, but I developed a second one on my left wrist, right where my watch band goes.  Of course, I didn’t have a watch to wear in those days.  But when the cheerio on my wrist developed, Mom made me wear a gauze and tape patch on that one, too. 

   Now those purplish cheerios had a nasty smell which you noticed whenever you changed the dressing.  But I didn’t have to change the dressing on the wrist one to enjoy its disgusting odor.  It was available at any time by raising my wrist to my nose.

     What I remember is dipping the sewer juice out of the fifty-gallon drum, using my left hand part of the time, to hold the fruit juice can.  Which was more disgusting, the smell of the sewer juice, or of that small pox blister?  And how did I get that second blister?  Was it related to the sewer juice job?  I don’t know, but I often suspected they were related.  How did we survive all that?  Or are we as healthy as we are because we were subjected to such nastiness and our immune systems learned to adapt?

      I remember one sewer backup that had to be drained in the basement.  Dad would loosen the cleanout plug enough to let the liquid escape.  He placed a wash tub beneath the pipe.  When it was full, he tightened the plug and he and Uncle Ricky carried the tub up the outside steps into the tree lot.  Uncle Ricky insisted that most of the waste be poured on one tree three rows in.  Sure enough, that tree soon grew head and shoulders above its compatriots.  We called it Ricky's tree.  It did survive the sixties, but now is one of those awaiting the snarling buzz of the chainsaw.    

     Well back to the elms.  They provided us a lot of work and a lot of entertainment.  It came to pass that you couldn’t see through the tree lot, let alone drive through it.  It made a dandy place to play hide-and-go seek, or “cowboys in the dark”.  It was a great place to hunt sparrows (and a few other birds) with our bb guns.

    One time Brother Dave broke the bone behind his little toe and had to wear a cast and use crutches to walk.  He found out soon enough he could walk on the cast without using crutches, but he was severely warned he shouldn’t do that.  So he would drop his crutches, pick up his bb gun and disappear into the trees.  When he had enough bird hunting he would yell for Sister to find and fetch his crutches for him so he could three-leg it out of the shelter of the trees.

    Then came another great debate between Mom and Dad: to trim or not to trim.  Mom said yes, Dad said no.  Mom won. 

     We sawed branches away from the trunks to a height of four or five feet.  We used handsaws.  Worse than sawing was dragging branches out of the forest and piling them up.  We had a couple of huge piles for a year or two, until they dried enough to have a huge bonfire.  No more hiding in the trees.  You could see through the rows.  And the wind could blow through them too.  We didn’t realize we had gotten used to being protected from the north wind.

  Another big change came when many of them croaked during the sixties to Dutch elm disease.  The little wood burner in the kitchen has been amply supplied with elm firewood.

      I replaced most of the dead ones with cedars, trying to get them in to a straight line but having to follow Dad’s “footsteps.”  It took a lot of work cutting and hauling the wood and the branches, digging out the roots.  An overhaul of the septic system and the installation of a leech field rendered the former watering method inoperable.  Enough garden hose and some wet years helped the cedars thrive and once again the wind doesn’t blow very hard from the north. 

    Sixty years have come and gone since those “sticks” went into the ground.  Fifty years is about the life expectancy of an elm.  The twenty or so that survived the Dutch elm disease are starting to succumb to old age.  I bought a good chainsaw about fifteen years ago.  We had a McCullough before that.  Cutting a tree down is lots easier.  But disposing of the branches and stacking the firewood remains a time and energy-consuming task.

      Some just get a trim job, like the dead ones hanging over the garage roof.  The tin suffered a couple of dents during the operation.  I used the fallen branches for roof protection, but some of the falling wood found its way through the padding.

    Yet to come, the felling of this old friend, but that’s another story.  Would Mr. Ekgren consider this spruce a tree, I wonder.

          

       

    

      

Defence

     “Something there is that doesn’t love [barbwire]”to paraphrase Robert Frost. 

     The fence went up in something like 2010 in order to graze the CRP grass prior to breaking it out for farming purposes.  It also served to carry current from the farmyard to the fence a half-mile east, for the same purpose of grazing CRP grass.

     I removed all of the other fences as I began tilling the two plots.  For some reason, I left that fence.  I was probably thinking I might want to graze the east piece again someday, because it did have a good stand of clover.  I could use the remaining fence line to carry electricity again.

      I haven’t grazed anything for five or six years.  So last spring I began taking down that fence.  Initially, I used some of the posts to fence around some blue spruce that the deer were abusing.

     The fence became an annoyance.  It threw itself into the way of various and sundry plows.  Even a pickup mirror struck a fence post.  Just to name two things that didn’t love “a wall.”  Plus, grass and weeds find a solace on either side of the wire where neither plow nor mower can touch it.

      Time to “defence”.  The weather granted me a one-day window of opportunity this week.  It was a bit windy but warm enough to work outside comfortably.  (The window closed quickly--see above photo.)

      The real work was rolling up the wire.  They make machines to handle that chore, but I didn’t have one at hand.  So, roll it up the old-fashioned way.

      The handy-dandy post puller makes uprooting the steel posts a piece of cake.  The hardest part of post-pulling is carrying the post-puller from post to post.

  

     Then the posts have to be picked up and stowed.  Harness the 4X4.  It doesn’t respond to voice command, like a horse might.  You have to get in, drive a few yards, get out and pick up a post.  It doesn’t have to be fed on a daily basis, however.

      There was a nice neat stack, teepee style, of posts and wire from the removal of the other fences.  Something (the wind, no doubt) didn’t love that neat stack.  It went down into a heap.

       An hour got things neatened up a bit.

       It took two or three days to build that fence.  Driving a post is a lot of work and takes time.  It took less than six hours to remove the fence.